Problem with WD Advanced Format drive in LINUX (WD15EARS)

I got a new harddrive with a bit more capacity for my stuff. It's a brand new WD15EARS from Western Digital. This drive uses, as one of the first, the newer 4096 byte big sector size instead of the common 512 byte. This is indicated on a label on the package and also on the Harddrive including instructions what you have to do when you are using Windows XP to get the drive working properly. Read this Article for more information about 4k sector size HD's

The last sentence on the label is a lie:All other OS configurations - drive is ready for use as is

ProblemI installed it yesterday, created a fresh partition table and EXT3 filesystem with gparted and startet to copy my data from the old disk to the new WD15EARS.

Write speed was horrible slow. As a patience person I gave the process a lot of time to finish but after 24 hours only 100 Gbyte was copied…Very slow transfer rate of less then 1 Mbyte/s!!

SolutionSearching the Internet including the WD forum didn't gave me an answer. So I tried to follow the instructions for using the HD with the old Windows XP: set jumpers 7-8 prior to installation or use WD Align SW

but no luck!

Where's the Error?For me it seems that the problem is that only the consumer but not his operating system knows about Advanced format:hdparm -i /dev/sda

The drive does NOT report his sector size so hdparm and all other tools suggest that it is 512 byte (You see this with hdparm -I /dev/sda), what will cause miss aligned filesystem blocks like described in the article above what happens with Windows XP.More testing

Then I started playing arround with different partion tables (MS DOS and GPT) and different filesystems (EXT3, reiserfs, XFS). All the time it gave me the same result, exept XFS. Anytime you recognise that something is wrong during filesystem initialising because it is way slower than usual.

(parted) mkpart primary ext2 40 -1# Here ^ we're creating a partition that starts at sector 40, which isdivisible by 8.# You can also try 48, 56, 64 and others - these should offer the samehigh performance,# but some space will go to waste - it's only some tiny kilobytes, though.

# Parted will likely complain about the end location of the ending sector:Warning: You requested a partition from 40s to 2930277167s.The closest location we can manage is 40s to 2930277134s.Is this still acceptable to you?Yes/No?# Of course, we answer Yes.

Re: Problem with WD Advanced Format drive in LINUX (WD15EARS)

Hopefully, WD will decide that it is necessery that a HDD reports it's correct sector size to the OS. Else all the good efforts of the OS and HDD tool developers, like what they currently discuss at the Linux Kernel Mailinglist, is useless and an unknowing user will still get frustrated.

Re: Problem with WD Advanced Format drive in LINUX (WD15EARS)

I also bought a WD15EARS drive. I'm totally frustrated. If you think to buy a WD drive and you will use Linux and Windows on those disk: LOOOK FOR AN OTHER DEVICE MANUFACTURE! Maybe you are a harddisk expert and you are motivated to invest many hours, than you can do it. I spend more then 20 hours for partition disk in a correct way with(!) a good performance. And I think every poster on this site too.

I tried the performance script from aadamowski and I can conform the performance problem with Linux. Setting the partitions to the correct borders, like suggested, you can't use the disk with windows XP! The Windows System can not generate a NTFS on the disk.

I found out with the benchmark script from aadamowski, that the 10 time boost just work if your harddisk is configured with "R/W multiple sector transfer" of 16. By default on my Debian/unstable 64bit system (Kernel 2.6.32.7 with util-linux 2.17 it has the value 1. If I set it to 16 with:hdparm --yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing -m 16 /dev/sdbI'm getting the boost (and I don't know what I am doing there ;-)).

I will give the device a last try, otherwise I will send it back. It's just a harddisk (I thougt) :-(